Month: December 2013
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4 new posts from naturalhistories
For today, instead of publishing a new article, we have brushed up some older ‘shells and pebbles’ from a friendly blog: Ilja Nieuwland, Robert-Jan Wille and Andreas Weber, the authors of naturalhistories.net, are moving their and our favorite posts to ShellsAndPebbles. You can find the first batch of posts (4 in total) below. Have fun!
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New dinosaurs, old animals
Review of: John Conway, C.M. Kosemen & Darren Naish (2012). All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. London: Irregular Books. Price: (Amazon Kindle E-book) or (Printed version via Lulu.com). By Ilja Nieuwland ‘Paleo-art’, or the art of restoring extinct life, has experienced a number of paradigmatic changes during its two-hundred-or-so-years…
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Dutch movable stations in nature — “For a dime on the first row”?
By Robert-Jan Wille Recently, the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera station has welcomed new guests. A group of Dutch scientists from the universities of Utrecht and Groningen and from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research arrived this season to do laboratory research, financially supported by the NWO, the Dutch NSF. Neither being able nor willing…
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The evolution of Gerhard Heilmann’s Iguanodons
By Ilja Nieuwland The Danish artist-cum-scientist Gerhard Heilmann, who became famous for his book The Origin of Birds, published a little-known, short piece about Iguanodon a few years later, in an issue of Othenio Abel’s journal Palaeobiologica, dedicated to the Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo. In many ways, this Iguanodon is much more ‘old-fashioned’ than his…
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A Dutch national museum that was never meant to be
By Robert-Jan Wille In the 1870s, after the Franco-Prussian war, the art and sciences budget of the Netherlands increased dramatically. If the Dutch ever had an Victorian age in which some dreamt of cathedrals of science, it was then. In 1872-3 nearly 1,5 million guilders (quite a lot at that time) was reserved to upgrade…
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The (forgotten) Dutch attempt to stimulate IT education
By Katrin Geske In January 1984, three ministries, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry for Science and Education, and the Ministry for Agriculture and Fishery[1] established a policy for stimulating information technology (IT) made in the Netherlands: the Information Technology Incentive Plan (the Dutch name was INformatica StimuleringsPlan, hereafter INSP). In this program, the…